The Buried Cartridge

"The Buried Cartridge – How the worst video game ever made destroyed an industry" tells the legendary story of the Video Game Crash of 1983. Atari was the king of the world, the fastest-growing company in US history. In a hubristic rush to cash in on the movie E.T., they forced one developer to code the game in just five weeks. The result was a glitchy, unplayable mess. Gaming historian Michael Pitel chronicles the aftermath: Millions of cartridges were returned. Atari, facing financial ruin, secretly loaded 700,000 unsold games into trucks and buried them in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The crash wiped out 97% of the video game industry's revenue in two years. "The Buried Cartridge" is a business thriller about quality control. It shows how flooding the market with garbage product ("shovelware") alienated an entire generation of consumers, until Nintendo eventually arrived to save the medium.